


The Nicolosi Paradox: Season 16, Character Growth, and the Question of What Matters

by anneapocalypse



Series: The Meta: Essays on Red vs. Blue [5]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-24 03:03:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 12,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17696426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: A nonfiction meta analysis of Red vs. Blue season 16 through the lens of character growth and relationship development.





	1. Preface

**Author's Note:**

> Note: This essay widely references things discussed in my season 15 essay and I would recommend reading that first if you haven't.
> 
> Warning in this essay for discussions of casual misogyny and racist stereotypes, and mentions of sexual harassment and rape.

Out of Mind is a five-part miniseries set mid-season-4 in the Blood Gulch Chronicles and airing as a prologue to season 5. It is narrated by Agent Texas and is the first story in the Red vs. Blue universe told from a Freelancer’s point of view. It introduces Agent York, and also features Agent Wyoming, one of the main villains of the Blood Gulch chronicles and also the first to permakill a named character.

Agent York is  _not_  the first named character to be permakilled in Red vs. Blue. That honor, I  _believe_ , belongs to Phil in season 3. RIP Phil. If you don’t remember who Phil is, that’s why we’re about to talk about York and not Phil.

(Yes, this post is about season 16. Take a seat, I gotta get us there.)

Agent York is introduced in Out of Mind, Part 3, as one of Tex’s “old Freelancer buddies,” whom she enlists for help against Wyoming. York is immediately introduced as witty, charming, and affable, and instantly won a whole lot of fans’ hearts. Two episodes later, York is killed by Wyoming, and his AI Delta chooses to stay behind with him, a plot thread that picks up a season later in the Recovery One miniseries.

Fans wouldn’t see York alive again until the season 9 trailer, promoting a new flashback arc that would take us inside the shadowy Project Freelancer itself, a backstory which had previously existed mostly in fans’ imaginations.  _Before there was Red vs. Blue, there was Project Freelancer._  And before there was the Freelancer arc, there was Out of Mind—the first glimpse we ever got into the Project itself, brief though it was.

Out of Mind represented a point of escalation in the Red vs. Blue canon. It was the first time we were shown that a character we liked and gave a shit about could die— _actually_  die, not just become a ghost like Church and Tex. It also drew a distinction for us that would become even sharper in Recovery One and Reconstruction: Blood Gulch characters don’t die. Freelancers very much do.

By the end of season 7, even that rule had been shaken (though it did ultimately turn out to hold true—Donut, Lopez, Kaikaina and Junior all survive their presumed deaths). By the end of season 8, there is real tension around who will survive the final battle—particularly when it comes to Wash, Tex, and the Meta. Freelancers can be killed. And one of them is.

By the end of season 9, the show’s  _first_  Freelancer is, perhaps not dead per se, but definitely  _gone_  and pretty clearly written out of the story for good.

By season 10, though the return of Donut and Lopez has restored our faith in the Blood Gulch plot armor, we have already seen one Freelancer die onscreen, and at the time no one could be certain that the present-day storyline would not end with Carolina’s death, though that did not happen. Instead, the show closes the curtain on the (in-universe) original Church, precursor to the show’s first protagonist, and heretofore-seen biggest villain. And the flashback arc closes on characters we’ve come to love—all the while knowing their deaths are imminent.

And that’s how your wacky comedy about a bunch of incompetent doofuses wearing the thickest plot armor imaginable also becomes a show infamous for killing off so many beloved characters, even though most of them were dead before they were beloved.

Stakes escalate as the storylines grow more grounded and serious. And as stakes grow, actions have increasingly significant consequences in the narrative, something I think Miles Luna  _absolutely_  keyed into in writing his Chorus Trilogy.

I say  _keyed into,_  not  _invented._  That escalation began all the way back in Blood Gulch. One thing Red vs. Blue has historically done well is not to escalate too much too quickly. The show’s tonal shift is gradual, and so too is the escalation of stakes. The stakes of season 1 are a game of Capture the Flag and whether Church can keep his ex-girlfriend out of trouble. The stakes of the Chorus trilogy are the survival of an entire planet. But that wasn’t an abrupt transition. We took our time getting here.

Season 8 took a collection of characters who still mostly professed to hate each other and asked: Why  _are_  you here, anyway? It cast off the “stuck in a box canyon” conceit and pointed out that they’re now in a position where any of them could leave if they really wanted to—but they don’t. Instead, they decide to stay and fight together.

Season 10 asked a similar question, pushing the Reds and Blues (now including Wash) to decide what is really their fight, and what they are willing to endure for friendship or for old times’ sake. Once again, their bonds are called into question, and once again, in the end they stand together.

In the Chorus Trilogy, Miles Luna took this group of characters known for succeeding through the power of friendship and sheer dumb luck, and asked whether there might be greater shades of heroism in them—and what kind of circumstances it might take to draw those out. He took two battle-worn badasses who had never really been any kind of heroes and asked what kind of heroes they could be. And the result is a story that pushes nearly every character to new limits, and lets us watch them grow.

The Chorus Trilogy is the story of a war-torn planet and its battered people and how they challenge the Reds and Blues (this includes Wash and Carolina) to become their better selves. The Chorus Trilogy is the first time Wash sacrifices himself for  _anyone._ It is the first time Wash expresses even a  _hint_  of remorse over what he did to Donut. It’s the first time Church, any Church, undertakes a truly selfless act. It shows Carolina grappling with her past demons and forced to take stock of what she was responsible for and  _let go_  of what she could not control. It shows all the Reds and Blues, but most especially  _Tucker_  wrestling with the stakes of leadership in a very real life-or-death situation.

Increased stakes mean actions have greater consequences. Greater consequences drive character growth.

So with all that in mind…

Let’s talk about Season 16.


	2. I Can Take Nothing Away From You

It is not my intention in writing this to attack or belittle anyone, to take anything away from anyone, to ruin anything for anyone. This is true regardless of how you feel about season 16 and the Nicolosi arc at large. If you love it, I can’t take that away from you. If you hate it, I can’t take that away from you. If you think that anyone who disagrees with your opinion is just a silly dumb-dumb who doesn’t understand the heart and soul of Red vs. Blue—

Okay, that one I’m not a big fan of, admittedly, but I still can’t take it away from you.

What I want you to know is that  _I do not think that of you._  I do not think you are stupid if you disagree with me. I’m not here to yell at you, insult you, tell you you’re not a true fan, et cetera.

I just have some Thoughts and some Feelings and I’d really like to be able to talk about them. And if you want to respond, I welcome that, but please don’t come in here assuming the worst about my intentions.

It’s been over six months since the season 16 finale aired. Season 17 is now scheduled for an early premier, just over a month from now, and I admit, I’m not prepared for it. For one thing, I wanted to have this post out months ago, and oh my god did I try, but for a long time what I really wanted to say about this season evaded me.

Months later, I still can only sum up my feelings as “conflicted.”


	3. The Theme of Actions and Consequences

The theme of the Nicolosi arc is “Actions have consequences. Sometimes, unintended and unpredictable consequences.” I think this theme is evident across both seasons thus far and it is within the context of this theme that I think the various elements of this season and Joe’s seasons as a whole are best examined and understood—good or bad, love them or hate them. Season 15’s theme is pretty much laid out in dialogue at the outset: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Temple and the Blues and Reds present a reaction to Project Freelancer’s treatment of simulation troops, something Joe felt the show hadn’t explored very deeply prior.

That’s a really cool idea. I mean, look at it this way: the show is  _about_  simulation troopers; the core cast are simulation troopers, and our whole connection to Project Freelancer is through the simulation troopers. And yet, the Freelancer flashback arc never once shows the Freelancers training on simulation bases, and our core cast appear to be outliers. Bits of canon here and there suggest that sim troopers were regularly killed in training exercises, but because of the plot armor protecting the core cast, we don’t see that. Joe keyed into that gap in the canon, saw the potential in that untold story.

“Sometimes pawns kill kings,” as Temple says, isn’t a bad description of the Reds and Blues killing the Meta, or hunting down the Director, but Joe flips it on its head, makes this pawn the hero of his own story but the villain of ours. Season 15 puts back in the spotlight, via distorted mirror, the story of the sim troopers—Red vs. Blue’s smallest biggest story.

That story concludes with the doomsday device as a jumping-off point to introduce time travel… an element which will play with that theme of actions and consequences in increasingly complicated ways. I like that. I think it’s a bold move in a good way to bring us a story that has nothing to do with the military, since trying to tie in last season’s climax with the UNSC fell particularly flat to me.

And at the same time, the theme still follows pretty neatly from season 15, as do many of 16’s plot elements. I don’t know how much Joe had planned for season 15 to act as a prologue to what would come after, and how much is simply his ability to find the breadcrumb trails in his own work, but it’s there: Loco’s machine was already a time machine, Donut got zapped at the end, Grif wanted to go out for pizza. That lead-in to season 16 really works, while still letting 15 be its own story.

And the stakes, that thing I talk about in the prologue, are now the fabric of spacetime itself.


	4. The Question of What Matters

I think Joe Nicolosi wants to tell us a story that matters.

Part of the difficulty of that is that you can’t make  _everything_  matter in Red vs. Blue.

Like, okay, going forward, you  _could,_  hypothetically, set up a story in which every character’s every action was played straight and treated exactly as seriously as it would be in the real world—but that would no longer be a comedy, and it also wouldn’t be  _Red vs. Blue._

And there are ways in which this has always been kind of a difficulty for RvB. The prime example that comes to mind for me is how violence and threats of violence from female characters are typically played much more seriously, whereas from male characters they are much more frequently played as a joke. This is partly a result of most female characters in RvB being portrayed as hypercompetent badasses while the main male cast are largely portrayed as barely-competent buffoons. There are exceptions, of course. And sometimes there is a strong tonal dissonance even within the same character—epsilon!Tex beating up the Reds and Blues in the warehouse, for example, is played for comedy, while her shooting Epsilon a few episodes later is played deadly serious. This tonal yoyoing is baked into the heart and soul of the show; you couldn’t remove it at this point if you tried, and again, if you could, it wouldn’t be Red vs. Blue anymore.

That said, there are times where it works better than others. The above example with e!Tex has never bothered me too much personally. It does bother some fans due to the quasi-romantic nature of Epsilon and E!Tex’s relationships, and that’s worth acknowledging. One that has always bothered me is basically everything with Doc in season 13—but we’ll come back to that later.

The theme of actions and consequences is a strong one, and it’s totally possible to pull off successfully in Red vs. Blue. Miles did it very successfully in the Chorus Trilogy. But hammering on the theme of consequences requires you to choose those consequences—which characters face them for what actions, and which characters do not.

And those choices also matter.


	5. On Characterization and Character Arcs

While I’m interested in the plot itself, I think this season (and honestly, the show as a whole) really stands or falls on its character arcs, so I’m going to be focusing on those much more heavily than the plot itself.

Like, the plot matters—the plot has always mattered to some degree, and you do need plot to push characters into action and drive character growth, but if the success of Rooster Teeth’s tentpoles has proven anything, it’s that when fans really care about your characters, they don’t actually care very much about plot. Even for those of us who do care (hi), it tends not to be a dealbreaker (I’m still here, aren’t I).

And because characters and character relationships are what I really care about in Red vs. Blue, I’m not interested here in picking apart plot holes in a Cinema Sins fashion. I’m not going to ask how Chrovos gave Donut the power to walk on water, or what Starseat really is, or where the hell the cyclops came from, or why the pizza Genkins brings to the past is actually a Margherita and not a pepperoni like Grif says, as if these were serious problems with the story. I’m not saying they aren’t noticeable or even distracting at times, but none of those things are dealbreakers for me. They don’t take me out of the story.

I’m not even going to spend time talking about how Joe’s use of the word “shisno” is an explicit and completely unnecessary retcon that has not been explained, even though it is.

Where Joe’s writing ramifies the most is with the characters, and I’m here to talk about them.

I enjoyed the first half of season 16 a lot, and that’s not “I can say nice things, really” lip service; if you go back through my early [episode posts](https://anneapocalypse.dreamwidth.org/tag/rvb:+season+16) for season 16, you can see that I was  _into it,_  excited to be here and looking forward to where we were going. I wrote last season about how the narrative weakens when the plot starts driving the characters instead of the other way around, and I think the time travel shenanigans were a good remedy for that this season; overall, they didn’t feel pointless or like padding to me.

The time travel sequence is plot-relevant, because we need to see the effects of the Reds and Blues’ actions to understand what was at stake. I think Sarge and Simmons’ adventures in trying to fix the past were both really fun to watch, and the best illustration of closed loops. Of all the characters, Sarge and Simmons had by far my favorite treatment in this season, both because this sequence is so entertaining and because Simmons’ nerdiness ends up being useful later on.

The time travel shenanigans also gave the characters time to loosen up and be themselves, without the constraints of plot pushing them forward, and I think that’s generally where Joe’s character writing is at its best.

But we do still have a plot, and that means we need us a protagonist.


	6. So Who’s Flying the Plane?

Quick! Who’s the protagonist of season 16?

(And yes, RvB is an ensemble cast but every arc has a protagonist. In Blood Gulch it’s Church, in Recollections it’s Wash, in Freelancer it’s Carolina, on Chorus it’s Tucker, and in season 15 it’s Dylan.)

It’s clear that Grif is  _supposed_  to be the protagonist of this arc. The first three episodes are Grif-centric, focusing on Grif’s point of view, and the need for Grif, specifically, to accept the call to adventure is heavily lampshaded throughout the first half of the season.

However, perhaps ironically, Joe spends easily as much time devoted to Tucker’s missteps and eventual character… growth?... than he does to Grif’s arc. And Tucker’s arc, whether or not it’s continuous with prior character development, is at least  _mostly_ continuous from season 15 to season 16, where Grif’s actually isn’t—his season 16 arc is a straight-up repeat of his arc in 15.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the fact that what Grif really wants is to get a pizza and chill. I loved Grif’s outburst in season 15. I thought it was in-character and a good and believable source of tension to be resolved later. My question is, how long is this going to be Grif’s motivation? Because while circumstances keep forcing him into action, his core motivation fundamentally hasn’t changed. That’s not really a problem  _until_  he’s expected to function as a protagonist and you’re trying to give him a character arc.

One framework for looking at character growth over the course of a narrative is in terms of  _want_  vs.  _need._  A protagonist typically begins with a want, which drives their action within the narrative but also usually drives a character flaw. But they also have a need, which contrasts with their want to drive their character growth. Often, a character’s arc will culminate with them being forced to choose between their want and their need. That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t get what they want in the end; if they do, their want is usually closely tied into their need, and they might get it in an unexpected way, or have to sacrifice something.

In the Recollections Trilogy, for example, what Wash  _wants_  is to be free of Project Freelancer. What Wash  _needs_  is to find people he can trust again. (And yes, Wash breaks bad in season 8, but he is also the point of view character for most of it, it is his motivation and his actions that drive the story; he is still very much the protagonist.) Throughout season 8, Wash’s fixation on his want actually drives him to work against his need, antagonizing the only people capable of helping him. Yet in the end, in finding that he can trust the Reds and Blues, Wash finds fulfillment of both his want and his need.

By contrast, it’s also possible for a protagonist to have negative character growth in which they fulfill neither their want nor their need. This is a perfectly valid way to end a narrative; then you have a tragic hero. Church—the first Church, Alpha, the protagonist of the Blood Gulch Chronicles—is a great example of this. What Church wants—what every version of Church wants, as we later learn—is to keep Tex safe. What Church needs is to learn to let Tex go. In the end, he fails to keep Tex safe, and his refusal to let her go is arguably what leads him to stay and sacrifice himself in the EMP. He fulfills neither his want nor his need, and his tragic flaw, his obsession with Tex, leads to his death. Church is a tragic hero. (Epsilon, later, is a kind of do-over of Alpha Church’s arc, in which he  _does_  learn to let Tex go, and finds fulfillment in self-sacrifice, not for her, but for the rest of his friends; fulfilling his need transforms his want.)

So in season 15, what Grif  _wants_  is to chill, but what he  _needs_  is his friends. Ultimately, his need overpowers his want; by the time he rejoins the cast, Grif is so lonely that he will do  _anything_  to reunite with his friends, including working with one of their past enemies to execute a dangerous rescue mission. But fulfilling his need neither fulfills nor transforms Grif’s want; he still fundamentally wants to be done with wacky adventures and relax. So Grif begins season 16 with the exact same want as he did in 15, and has to undergo effectively the same character arc.

While something felt off to me about Grif’s arc almost immediately in 16, I had a hard time justifying it, because frankly, wanting a pizza and a good long sit down seems so utterly in-character for Grif. It wasn’t until I looked at these two arcs in terms of want vs. need that I could put my finger on why I find Grif’s arc in season 16 unsatisfying.

Upon further examination, I think Grif’s need is a bit more complex. He needs to be with his friends, yes, but he also needs them to respect his feelings. He’s grown resentful of the fact no matter what happens, he’s just expected to go along with it. Being called lazy and selfish by his friends for protesting is just the icing on the shit cake. This is why Grif’s outburst in season 15  _did_  resonate so much for me. It rang true. It felt in-character and it felt like it  _mattered._

But looking back, this is exactly the part of Grif’s need that’s never really fulfilled. His friends don’t come back for him; he goes to them. It’s Grif who apologizes. No one apologizes for the things they said to him. And maybe that’s why Grif’s side of the reconciliation also feels incomplete. Despite how much he clearly missed his friends, the Blues included, he keeps telling Simmons how much he still hates them:

 

> "Tucker, Caboose, Sarge... Fucking Donut. Simmons, I hate those guys. I mean hate, but holy hell, does shit get boring without 'em, and you know, I figured without me to beat up on, y'all were doomed to fall apart at the seams. I'm your hate glue."

Woof.

So Grif’s arc in season 15 only resolves in the sense that he reunites with his friends, returning to the status quo. His relationship to his friends, with the exception of Simmons, does not change, his need is only partially fulfilled, and his want is unfulfilled. So he begins season 16 with the same want… and his arc basically resets from the beginning, except that this time his separation from his friends is involuntary. Yet again, he finds his wants belittled and dismissed, only this time it’s by Doc instead of Sarge and the Blues.

I mentioned that Simmons was the exception and he is—Grif’s relationship to Simmons does grow, and the end of 15 and the beginning of 16 give them some good moments. Jax’s interference and the queerbaiting question notwithstanding (which I covered last season), this is yet another thing I like in season 15: the separation does drive relationship growth for Grif and Simmons. But then they’re separated again at the beginning of 16, and don’t get to interact for most of the season, so there’s no room for their relationship growth to go anywhere.

For Grif to have a truly satisfying resolution to his arc, I think we really need to see his friends express in some way that they value him as much as we can tell he values them.

And by all the gods, the man better get a damn slice of pizza when this is all over.

But I guess it’s better than what they've done to poor Donut.


	7. What They've Done to Poor Donut

So, [no one has really known what to do with Donut since they brought him back from the dead](https://anneapocalypse.dreamwidth.org/21240.html). I cannot lay this one entirely or even mostly on Joe, and I would like to at least give him credit for trying. Donut is pretty much the only Blood Gulch character who gets  _no_  development during the Chorus trilogy. Even Lopez got his body back. Donut stands handcuffed next to Wash for an extended length of time and at no point is their history even acknowledged, which to me was a huge missed opportunity, especially since Miles decided to introduce the idea that Wash might actually have some buried remorse for shooting him.

In one of last year’s Reddit AMAs, Joe mentioned that he would’ve liked to give Donut more of a character arc in season 15, and I’m pretty sure he was trying to do that by making Donut central to the plot of The Shisno Paradox.

And he certainly is central to it, but for being so important Donut doesn’t actually get much screentime this season. He arrives in episode 2 as more of a quest-giver than an active character, disappears soon after, and doesn’t show up again until episode 10.

But the biggest problem with Donut’s arc, for me, is that it undermines the theme the entire Nicolosi arc is going for.

After Donut’s return, we see him return to Chrovos and talk with him, and here, it becomes clear that Chrovos is actively playing on Donut’s sense of rejection by his friends in order to manipulate him. Chrovos is the villain, but in this case, he’s also  _right._  “Name one nice thing they’ve done,” he says, and indeed it’s kind of hard to think of a time when most of the Reds and Blues have gone out of their way to be nice to Donut. Doc saved his life, and Caboose calls him a friend, but his own teammates more frequently reject him, silence him, and make fun of him.

And just when they need Donut on their side, they all double down on their worst treatment of him—and this has consequences.

> "Gullible. Stupid. An empty suit of armor? Thanks for making this easier, guys."

And with that, Donut absconds with the only weapon that can destroy their enemy.

This is all great.

This is how a story about actions having consequences  _should_  go. You rejected your friend and treated him like shit for years, and he decided to turn on you the minute he got a better offer. Sucks to be you, but you did this to yourself.

But then Donut just changes his mind. And like Grif, it’s totally unprompted by the people who hurt him in the first place. No one changes, no one apologizes, Donut just… changes his mind at the last minute because he clues into the fact that Chrovos, like everyone else in his life, does not care about him. So… back to square one, I guess?

“They don’t always treat me great,” Donut declares, “but they are still my friends!” And he decides to strike Chrovos with the Hammer.

And if Grif’s season 15 arc is any indication, then I can’t expect anyone will apologize to Donut either.

So I guess that didn’t matter, after all.

And speaking of which.


	8. Doc Who?

I mentioned earlier that I am not fond of what Miles did with Doc in the Chorus Trilogy.

For a refresher: Doc shows up with Donut mid-season-11 and lasts about six episodes before he vanishes via future cube. He shows up again mid-season-13 in a cave. No one had noticed he was missing, and this realization combined with the trauma of having been knocked around in another dimension for two seasons triggers Doc’s O’Malley personality to resurface. Dr. Grey gets to chase him around and make a joke about electroshock therapy. It’s Uncomfortable.

In the Blood Gulch Chronicles, no one caring about Doc isn’t jarring because all of the characters treat one another with cavalier dickishness. But by season 13 the bonds between these characters have strengthened considerably; they have learned to rely on each other, and a major theme of the Chorus trilogy is sticking by your people, being a team, taking care of each other.

Doc doesn’t get to be a part of that. Like Donut, he is still treated mostly as a punching bag, the buttmonkey. As 16 opens, he’s still feeling bad about siding with the Blues and Reds the previous season, and Grif has no intention of letting him live it down.

But hang on, why did Doc side with the Blues and Reds again?

> **Tucker** : What? Doc? We've been through so much!
> 
> **Doc** : We sure have! You guys used me as a bargaining chip in Blood Gulch, before you got bored and cast me out to live in a cave! Then you left me to the mercy of the Meta, then you abandoned me in Valhalla, then you didn't even notice when I got sucked into another dimension on Chorus, and [lapses into O'Malley voice] nearly lost my— [coughs] sorry, something in my throat—nearly lost my mind.
> 
> **Simmons** : No way, when did that happen?
> 
> **Doc** : My point exactly! You guys treat me like a leper. Just hoping some time in the brig might teach you some manners.

Oh right.

I guess their treatment of Doc had some consequences, huh.

But now, in season 16, no one acknowledges that Doc had any valid grievances, least of all Doc himself, who is just consumed by guilt instead, and Grif belittles him until he—wait for it—shifts into O’Malley.

It seems like Doc is only really considered  _useful_  when the writers (I include both Miles and Joe in this) can turn him into O’Malley, in whom they seem much more interested—ironic, because Doc’s O’Malley personality isn’t really that interesting. Even in season 16, where O’Malley is hanging out with Chrovos and becomes effectively Donut’s final boss, his role in the plot is barely set up, and prior to that fight we never really see him  _do_  anything.

The writers continue make it an in-universe joke that no one cares about Doc… because  _they_  don’t care about Doc, and they expect us to think it’s funny that they don’t care about Doc, and therefore no one else does. Back in Blood Gulch, where it didn’t stand out, it was funny. Now, when relationships and how characters behave within those relationships is supposed to matter, it’s just kind of painful to watch.

I’d almost rather they just write him out, if this is going to be it for Doc from here on.

And speaking of relationships.


	9. The Reds and Blues’ Relationship to Chorus, and How the Nicolosi Arc Ruins It

I don’t use the word “ruins” lightly, but this is one of my absolute least favorite developments in the Nicolosi arc.

This is mostly about season 15, but I think it’s inextricably connected to some of the issues I have in 16 so I’m going to hit on it here.

Season 15 turned Tucker from a hero who genuinely cared about the people on Chorus, to like… an arrogant prick who takes advantage of his hero status to have a lot of sex and then skips town as quickly as possible, leaving a bunch of unsupported children behind. (And we’ll get more into Tucker later, but… oof.)

In fact, where seasons 12 and 13 were about the Reds and Blues coming to care about Chorus and make Chorus their fight, season 15 implies that the Reds and Blues find Chorus an annoyance and a burden, and left as soon as possible while still taking advantage of their hero status to leech off of Chorus’s no doubt meager resources.

Like, in the middle of rebuilding a war-torn planet, President Vanessa Kimball apparently allocated the resources to build the Reds and Blues brand-new bases on a remote moon, and risked her entire world’s sovereignty and safety to protect the location of their vacation spot.

And you can say that none of that is meant to be taken seriously, that none of it matters. But this is an arc about how things matter.

And when the Reds and Blues spring into action in season 15, it’s not out of concern for what Chorus might suffer at the hands of the UNSC, due to actions attributed to them. It’s because Church might be alive. They barely give Chorus a thought.

Back in season 12, the Reds and Blues are offered a chance to leave Chorus. Now, there’s considerable doubt as to whether this offer was genuine, considering the source, but in the ensuing discussion, their objections aren’t simply, “It’s probably a trap.” Even Sarge objects to leaving the Chorusans to their fate. _Sarge._ Sarge “I love blood and violence!” Sarge says “The thousands of deaths aren’t great either.”

So season 15’s portrayal of the Reds and Blues in relation to Chorus isn’t just unflattering—it doesn’t line up with their attitude toward Chorus in previous seasons. Sure, maybe they’re tired of being heroes. There’s nothing wrong with them wanting a break. But the disregard they show for Chorus in season 15 goes beyond that.

Which brings me to…


	10. We Need to Talk About Tucker

Let’s hit the Tucker thing, because we gotta.

This one’s… complicated. I know this one is extremely divisive, so let me try to reach across the divide for a sec.

Like a lot of the Blood Gulch characters, Tucker doesn’t really settle into his most familiar character patterns for a couple of seasons (his first “bow chicka bow wow” doesn’t come until season 3). But from the start he’s commenting about picking up chicks, and as the show progresses and the characters solidify there’s only more of that kind of thing written into Tucker—making sexual jokes and one-off comments, throwing around pick-up lines, and sometimes even actually flirting when the situation presents. It’s mostly in the vein of casual sexism, and a generally disrespectful attitude toward women. There aren’t really a whole lot of women around for Tucker to interact with (something Church actually points out at one point), and as such a lot of it comes off as idle posturing. Sometimes, not even posturing—Tucker himself makes a joke about having been told “Not if you were the last man on Earth,” which is either the most brutal self-own in the history of the character or a surprising level of self-awareness for Blood Gulch Tucker—take your pick.

Anyway, my point is that there’s plenty of things about Tucker’s writing that could make viewers uncomfortable, and that discomfort tends to take two distinct but related shapes. First, there’s simply the way the casual sexism reflects on Tucker himself, and that’s certainly enough to put off plenty of fans. Then, there’s the additional factor of Tucker being one of the few canonically black characters on the show, the only one in the Blood Gulch Chronicles and still the only one who isn’t a villain. This adds another layer of discomfort to this facet of Tucker’s character, but this time it’s more of a meta discomfort—this intersection does not reflect on Tucker but on the writer who made the choice to make Blood Gulch’s only black character highly sexualized in this way.

So when I say that there’s more to Tucker than that, I am not trying to deny that all of the above is there. It’s there. It’s a part of this conversation. I am not sweeping it under the rug, or saying that either layer of it should be ignored.

But I do want to point out here, specifically, that it’s basically impossible to have this conversation without looking at both the Watsonian and the Doylist viewpoints. A strict Watsonian reading might say that the misogyny Tucker exhibits makes him an unlikable character, and that misogyny should not be defended, and fans who are uncomfortable with Tucker’s behavior should be free to say so. A strict Doylist reading might say that the racist elements inherent in Tucker’s writing should be taken into account before simply condemning the character, and that fans wanting to take a more sympathetic reading of the only black character in the core cast should be free to do so.

These are both valid readings and we have to accept that they can exist side by side, or we end up arguing entirely past one another—and often making some pretty bad-faith assumptions about opposing viewpoints, which I’d like to avoid here.

But there is, nonetheless, more to Tucker’s character than that.

During season 16, I [wrote about](https://anneapocalypse.dreamwidth.org/26410.html) why Tucker’s arc in the Chorus Trilogy follows naturally from Tucker’s arc beginning all the way back in Blood Gulch. I don’t want to rehash all of that here, so I’d recommend going and reading that post first, but allow me to quote me:

 

> Tucker’s hypersexualization, as the first and one of very few canonically black characters on this show, is not a problem that started with Joe. It’s a problem that’s been there, has always been there, and it’s kind of too late to retroactively fix it at this point.
> 
> You can’t go back and unwrite Tucker’s personality. What you can do is make Tucker a more complex character by developing other aspects of his personality, and that, I would argue, has been going on as far back as season 3, when he finds the sword and embarks on the Great Journey.

I think that from one angle, Joe  _must_  have been trying to do something good, with regard to Tucker’s casually sexist behavior. Maybe he was even trying to respond directly to fan complaints about the problematic aspects of Tucker. I will give him the benefit of the doubt on that.

But I also want to explain why Tucker’s writing in the Nicolosi arc bothers some of us so much. You do not have to come out agreeing with me. I just want to talk about it.

Miles’ approach to Tucker was: Let’s add depth to him. We aren’t going to try and retcon his character but we are going to add more dimension to him and show growth in specific areas.

I will fully acknowledge that at no point during the Chorus Trilogy is Tucker’s sexist behavior ever called out. There were moments that bugged me a lot on a personal level, particularly in season 12 and particular in regard to the treatment of Jensen by Tucker, Palomo, and Simmons. Tucker asks Kimball if she’s single as soon as she denies being sexually involved with Felix. Et cetera. That stuff is there. It happened.

Here’s something else that happened:

 

> “It's like this: sometimes you're with a lady, right? And she wants to spice things up, so, you're like 'boom'—video camera. And she's into it, and then you're like ‘Aw yeah!’ but what's even better is that later you can go back and look at those tapes and figure out what was really working and what you can do better!”

I bring this up, not because it erases any of the rest of Tucker’s behavior, but because I want to point out a couple of things Miles seems to be trying to tell us about Tucker in this piece of dialogue:

  * He has sexual experience. To my ear, this is both too candid and too specific for Tucker to be merely posturing. Compare to something he says to Wash in season 11, where he doesn’t even try to make Wash take his comment seriously (and lest we attribute this to Miles re-writing Tucker’s character, I will point out its similarity to Tucker’s self-drag back in season 3):



 

> **Wash** : You want me to believe you banged an entire bachelorette party?
> 
> **Tucker** : I want you to, but really the groom just showed up and cracked three of my ribs.

  * He makes a point of the encounter being consensual, mentioning his partner being “into it.”

  * He cares about his partner’s experience, not just about getting laid. The whole point to this story is the value of reviewing his own performance for self-improvement.




That this anecdote comes up during training does not particularly make Tucker less sexualized, and it certainly doesn’t negate any of the times when his comments are downright inappropriate. But it does establish some parameters around Tucker’s inappropriateness. To put this more explicitly: Miles wants us to know that while Tucker may be sex-obsessed, he is not wholly selfish, and that while Tucker may be inappropriate at times, he’s not a  _rapist_.

That is the kind of thing which, if it might be in question, is a good thing to establish about your protagonist, so: good move, Miles.

(This is also something I really wish Jordan Cwierz had paid attention to before that fucking character assassination he attempted on Tucker in “Fifty Shades of Red.” Why that was allowed to go forward, a scene that tries to turn the protagonist of the previous three-season arc into a statutory rapist, is something I will never understand, especially with Miles himself at the helm of the season. But we’re not here to talk about season 14.)

So to sum up: Miles did not fundamentally change Tucker’s character. What he did was try to fend off the worst possible readings of it, while giving him growth and development in other areas—specifically in the area of responsibility and leadership.

If I may quote myself again:

 

> I am not saying that Tucker’s rise to protagonist status was always planned, but I am saying that Miles chose him for a reason. Tucker’s capability in the Chorus arc is not an eleventh-hour add-on to his character. It’s always been there. Always.
> 
> Tucker’s character progression has been a strong, consistent arc from Blood Gulch to Recollections to present-day season 10 to the Chorus Trilogy. The person Tucker becomes on Chorus is the culmination of a ten-year character arc, and the change Tucker undergoes on Chorus is not that he becomes capable. He was always capable. Wash sees that in him in season 11, and says so very clearly.
> 
> Tucker grows into his capability on Chorus because his environment drastically changes. He is thrown into a real war with real stakes. He must rise to the challenges before him because to fail means to see real people die—his old friends, his new acquaintances, and the de facto team leader he has begun to regard with a grudging respect. This is important: Tucker’s arc on Chorus and specifically his arc in season 12 is about coming to recognize the  _stakes_  of the conflict—understanding that a wrong decision in this context will get people killed.

That the next logical step in Tucker’s ongoing character arc would be addressing his inappropriate behavior and casual sexism is not at all an unreasonable idea.

But in season 15, Joe shows little interest in carrying forward Tucker’s Chorus-era growth. He gets a protective moment with his friends in “Nightmare on Planet Evil,” which is quickly undercut by the “You’ve been served” gag. The Temple of Procreation backfill raises some uncomfortable questions about consent, undermining some of what Miles tried to accomplish with Tucker in the Chorus Trilogy. And the child support gag doubles down on the inherent racism in Tucker’s writing by piling on another stereotype—unconsciously perhaps, but it’s there. That also happened.

I’ve [covered](https://anneapocalypse.dreamwidth.org/23723.html) the way Tucker’s lack of suspicion, and later his impulsiveness, weakens the narrative as a whole and Temple as a villain specifically, so I won’t go into that here. A season later, and with more to consider about the way Joe writes Tucker, I feel that even if you can explain Tucker being off his game in season 15 (and you really can make up an explanation for just about anything if you’re creative, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best choice for the story or the character), it both weakens Tucker’s own characterization and undercuts his past growth.

To go back to Chorus again: Tucker makes mistakes on Chorus. He makes plenty. But it’s worth looking at  _why_  he makes those mistakes. In season 12, Tucker sneaks off on a mission to try and grab intel about where his friends are. He doesn’t stick to the plan, and he doesn’t tell anyone else what he’s doing. This isn’t out of character or strange. When season 12 was airing, we had conversations about who was  _responsible_  for that mission failure, but we were not widely questioning whether it made sense for Tucker to do what he did—because of course it made sense. He was  _winging it._

And in every situation up until that point, winging it had  _worked_  for the Reds and Blues. It had worked for Tucker when he was alone in the desert, fending off Fake CT and his goons. It even works later in season 12, when it’s just the Reds and Blues acting together—that’s sort of the point. Tucker fucks up not by having some kind of lapse, by being off his game, or even by being impulsive—but by doing exactly what has worked out fine for him up until this point. He fucks up because what he’s used to is no longer appropriate to these circumstances. And it shakes his confidence, but it also heavily drives Tucker’s character growth throughout the rest of the trilogy.

In season 15, Tucker makes mistakes  _not_  based on incomplete past experience or new circumstances with higher stakes. In fact, given his past experience, we have to come up with other reasons why he makes those mistakes.

Then season 16 comes along, and once again raises the stakes. But these higher stakes drive no character growth for Tucker.

As I said above, I did genuinely enjoy most of the first half of season 16, and that includes the Tucker and Kaikaina bits. It did change some ideas I’d had about them earlier in canon, but I try to be open to that sort of thing. Tucker being all talk back in Blood Gulch never felt out of character to me; I’ve written about [his insecurity and desire to be liked](https://anneapocalypse.dreamwidth.org/20693.html), and I think that’s been as ever-present as his capability under pressure. That he and Kai had a sexual encounter cut short by his own nerves was believable to me, and I would take that over the implication that he’s a sexual predator any day of the week. It doesn’t follow that he hasn’t had any sexual experience since, so it’s not necessarily at odds with Miles’ season 12 characterization of him. That Tucker might be a little hurt or even rattled by Kaikaina’s rejection or by her poking fun at him isn’t necessarily out of character either. As others have pointed out to me, Kai might be the first woman out of the show’s many female characters that Tucker  _actually_  felt like he had a chance with, and thus he took her rejection a lot harder.

And there is some Tucker this season that I really, truly  _love._  “Sis and Tuck’s Sexcellent Adventures” gave us a heartfelt moment between Tucker and Kaikaina in which both characters reflect on mistakes they’ve made and express a longing for a simpler time, something that feels very honest and probably relatable to a lot of viewers. It’s a good moment.

The cyclops episode, goofy as it is, lets Tucker be both capable and funny. It gave us “It only turns on for me, bow chicka bow wow!” which is one of my favorite lines from this season and which, it’s worth pointing out, is an innuendo and is funny  _without_ being misogynistic.

Tucker ruining Kaikaina’s time travel sex tour didn’t bother me as it was happening, and seemed at the time to be more reflective of the unexpected consequences of time travel than of Tucker, specifically, being an asshole—especially when juxtaposed with the rest of the Reds and Blues bungling things in their own ways.

But then the plot returns, and things sort of… escalate from there.

The Camelot scene was the first this season that felt truly painful to sit through. I said it in my previous Tucker post, but it needs to be said again: This is not Blood Gulch Tucker. This is not Recollections Tucker, or season 10 Tucker. This Tucker resembles no Tucker we have seen before, and knowing that  _this_  is what we were building too kind of casts even some of the Tucker I enjoyed earlier in the season in a different light.

He has postured, yes, but he has never been this  _desperate_  about it. He has wanted to be liked, yes, but he has never demanded his friends’  _subservience._

And he has made mistakes that cost people their lives, but he has never callously sent an army of people to their deaths to feed his own ego. Not pre-Chorus Tucker, and not the Tucker who agonized over those mistakes and learned from them.

It’s a joke, I hear you say.

But this arc is about how things matter.

But Tucker seems not to take the stakes seriously even when Grif and Huggins explain them, not even when he’s face to face with the Cosmic Powers themselves. All he thinks about is having wishes granted, and making dick jokes.

And when Kaikaina lays into Tucker in “Sword Loser”? Despite the apology that comes later in “Lights Out,” in  _this_  episode it’s framed like she’s  _100% right._  The camera zooms in on her helmet, she gets in Tucker’s face and leaves him speechless and it comes at the very end of an episode with a Grif zinger to close, the metaphorical mic drop.

I’m not blaming Kai for not knowing the person Tucker grew into on Chorus. I’m not blaming the character, in-universe, for finding Tucker’s behavior intolerable, because it is. I’m asking from a Doylist standpoint why the father who loves his alien son, the ambassador who held his own against unscrupulous and far more experienced soldiers in the desert and who helped defeat the Meta, the Captain who came to understand the stakes of war and outsmarted the mercenary who fooled multiple rebel Generals for years on end, the hero who fought to save a planet that was not his—why  _all_  of that has to be torn down to address Tucker’s remaining character flaw.

I’m asking why, if Tucker’s flaws were so obviously in need of addressing in-universe, was it necessary to make them noticeably worse before we could do so.

I’m asking why we couldn’t have done this another way, build further growth on the foundation that had already been laid—instead of ripping it all down and saying it was never there.

The apology scene tries to resolve things between Tucker and Kaikaina, and I’ll certainly allow it was better than no resolution at all. But even then, at the end of the conversation, Tucker is back to where he was at the end of season 15—consumed with guilt over the mistake that led to Wash’s injury. Only this time, that guilt is about to lead him into an even bigger mistake, with far bigger consequences. Even this scene isn’t really allowed to build on Tucker’s established character growth. The result of his genuine remorse about his recent fuck-ups is that he’s about to go and fuck up all over again.

A lot of us have really enjoyed watching Tucker’s character growth, and could have enjoyed watching him grow further and in new ways, but that’s not what this felt like.

Where Miles looked for ways to challenge Tucker and build him up, Joe looks for ways to take him down a peg—and ends up pulling his character apart at the seams.


	11. Kaikaina Grif, Feminist Icon

I always had a hard time with Sister back in Blood Gulch.

On the one hand, a female character who’s funny and not a terrifyingly hypercompetent badass, right? Seems like a good thing, especially in light of later seasons.

On the other hand… “seven abortions.”

So yeah, I was always kind of apprehensive about the prospect of Kaikaina coming back. Once I got involved with the fandom, I found many fan portrayals of Kai that endeared me to her, but it didn’t change the fact that her canon writing often left a bad taste in my mouth.

Kaikaina’s return in season 15 was a surprising joy to me. I loved the music festival backfill for her time in Blood Gulch, both because the idea of her surviving there alone for years was miserably depressing, and because it built on her established habit of throwing raves in Blue Base and charging at the door. (The best part of this, of course, is that her making ten bucks as she tells Wash means that Sarge and Lopez came to her rave.) That she has built a successful business for herself, while still being very distinctively Kaikaina, flows pretty nicely out of her established characterization. And also, her real name is finally used onscreen for the first time.

And I don’t think that Kai running a successful business has to undermine her as a comedic character or put her in the hypercompetent category with the female Freelancers. For one thing, that serious moment she has with Tucker in season 16 shows that she still acts with some recklessness in her personal relationships, and has made the mistake of mixing up business and pleasure, complicating things at her job. She’s still very much a regular person who makes mistakes, and she’s still very much  _Kaikaina_ , unabashedly herself, unabashedly liking sex and drugs and partying. The narrative goes out of its way to let her be sexually adventurous without ever shaming her for it. I think that’s something to celebrate.

How I feel about Kai’s role in the back half of season 16 is more complicated. I kind of hate to drag her into the Tucker discussion, because my issues with that are metatextual and really about Tucker’s characterization more than Kai’s. Everything she gets mad at Tucker for is perfectly justified in-universe, and save for some strange word choices, none of it feels grossly out of character to me.

That said, I have talked to people who feel like Kaikaina’s recent character developments do a disservice to the carefree and comedic nature of her character, and to all the things that set her apart from the pattern of hypercompetent female characters in RvB. I can sympathize with that. I’ve also seen people disappointed to see Kaikaina turned from a confident, self-actualized character pursuing her own desires, into a spotlight for Tucker’s flaws, a mouthpiece for perceived grievances perhaps on the part of fans, perhaps on the part of the author. I kind of feel that, a little.

Overall, I’m still happy to have Kaikaina back in the core cast, and I really hope she continues to be there. But I also think there’s room to focus more on her own character growth, and less on her as a vehicle for someone else’s.


	12. “Previously On” was an outlier adn should not have been counted.

So uh, yeah, that about wraps up my feelings on how the Blood Gulch characters are handled in this season… and now we gotta talk about the Freelancers.

“Previously On” was my favorite episode in season 15.

In hindsight—and I cannot overstate how much I hate saying this—I don’t think it represented what I thought it did. The way the Freelancers have been handled since that episode casts even that one shining moment in a different light.

Let’s revisit.

Wash was adopted and adapted into the Reds and Blues almost overnight. It took years for the show to sell Carolina as one of the family. She’s separated from them for over half the Chorus Trilogy, and even when she’s given her own arc in 13, it’s almost entirely separate from the Chorus storyline as a whole, and further separates her from the Reds and Blues. We see Carolina trying to joke with her team at the beginning of 13, but this also serves to highlight that she hasn’t quite grasped the group dynamics yet, doesn’t quite fit in. She has a few protective moments with them, most notably with the bubble shield, but when she refers to them as “family” it strikes me as a case of telling and not showing.

“Previously On,” for the first time,  _shows_  Carolina being one of the Reds and Blues. Hanging out with them just because. Having fun with them. “Can I sing?” was one of the highlights of season 15 for me.  _Joe did that_  and I give him all the credit in the  _world_  for giving us that moment, regardless of what comes after.

But we gotta talk about what comes after.

As soon as we’re really sold on Carolina being one of the family, it’s discarded almost immediately. Carolina and Wash are  _immediately_  separated from the Reds and Blues, and remain that way for most of the season. This pattern carries forward into season 16.

Now, not only does Carolina not get to be one of the gang—Wash doesn’t either.

 _Why do this?_  Why take such care in 15.05 to show Carolina having fun with the Reds and Blues and fitting in with them, only to rarely allow her screentime with them after that? Why drag  _Wash_  away from them?

Miles ran into the concern of Carolina feeling “overpowered” in season 12. His solution was to nerf her, by way of a clumsily-animated injury. Fans of Carolina were, needless to say, not real thrilled with this decision, especially since it wasn’t given any emotional follow-up, and also there was apparently no need to nerf Wash in kind.

Miles heard those criticisms. He heard them and he listened. He learned the lesson that a good story does not need to bring its heroes down to the level of its antagonists—it needs to create stakes and opposition equal to the heroes. And even granted that Carolina’s season 13 arc still keeps her at a distance from the Reds and Blues, it  _was_  an arc, and it let Carolina be  _Carolina_  and I give Miles all the credit in the world for that.

I don’t know why Joe keeps pushing the Freelancers off to the side. I don’t know if it’s because that lesson is one he has not learned, or if he’s struggling with ensemble casts generally (given the decision to split the Reds and Blues up into pairs for half the season), or because he simply doesn’t know what to do with them. But despite writing a whole episode that explicitly depicted Wash and Carolina as part of the family, he seems not to know what to do with them once the plot arrives, except to hustle them offscreen.

Even Wash.

 _Especially_  Wash.


	13. What About Wash?

You heard me right. Look, I am the  _last_  person to argue that Wash doesn’t get enough screentime. I am generally of the opinion that Wash had five solid years in the spotlight and it’s time to let other characters have a turn.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want Wash  _there_ , and it also doesn’t mean I want him to be treated like a talking crash dummy.

Wash is not the protagonist of the Chorus Trilogy, and that doesn’t stop him from having things to do. He steps sort of awkwardly into the team leader role, sacrifices himself to get the Reds and Blues to safety, demands answers from Doyle, becomes a drill instructor for the united Chorus armies, has some weird tension with Locus, and is generally  _around_  being his usual capable self.

Wash has never been the most proactive character (that’s another post) but when push comes to shove the man can get things done, and he does. Even in Freelancer, Wash’s most passive arc by a longshot, he does take at least some minor actions.

In the Nicolosi arc, what has Wash  _done_ , other than get whumped? Like, yeah, I’m glad there were actual consequences for Wash getting shot, but is this really all we can think of to do with his character now? Bullet through the neck for angst, memory lapses for angst, conflict with Carolina for angst. But where is Wash’s agency in all of this? Where is his role in the plot, beyond motivating other characters to feel bad, and then to make bad decisions because they feel bad?

And I can’t get through this essay without mentioning the absolutely incomprehensible decision to repurpose one of the most iconic character motifs in RvB history, “When Your Middle Name Is Danger,” the  _Meta’s_  theme, as ominous music to be played over Wash having a meltdown, but  _Jesus Christ,_  dude. I still remain utterly staggered by that creative decision.

I am not fond of what Joe has done with Carolina either, and I am years tired of storylines being structured around her mistakes for which she must be made to suffer and seek absolution, but at least Carolina is allowed enough agency in her own story to  _make_  a mistake.

I neither need nor want Wash in the spotlight, and we have enough canon Wash Angst to last a lifetime, but my god, let the man  _do_  something. Let him be a  _character._

And then… well, and then there was the backlash.


	14. The Bullet, the Backlash, the Brain Damage

So last season Wash and Carolina had a Moment and held hands and the fandom imploded.

I’m not going to get into the backlash. I asked readers of this to avoid assuming the worst about my motives and promised that I would do the same for you and I stand by that. The prospect of canon Washlina upset people. There was a backlash. Let’s just allow that it happened.

What Joe seems to have taken from the backlash is: The fans don’t like it when they get along, so let’s lampshade the shipping panic and then force some conflict between them.

And as a fan who is deeply invested in the friendship between Wash and Carolina, that is about the last thing that I wanted. I don’t know how to fully explain how much this plot development stung. It’s taken me six months and 10,000 words to get here and I still don’t know how to do it, because for all the Tucker thing left a bad taste in my mouth, Carolina is so personally important to me and her connection with Wash so important to me as a part of her story that I did feel kind of betrayed by this. That’s a bias that I fully own and can’t remove from my discussion of this plot point.

Carolina and Wash have had a complicated relationship since her return in season 10. In that season, Wash is watching Carolina make a series of mistakes he has already made, and with which he sympathizes but is increasingly uncomfortable. Eventually, Wash confronts her, but in the end, he comes to her aid alongside the Reds and Blues. On Chorus, Carolina runs off without a goodbye, but returns when she realizes the others are in trouble and steps in at the right moment to save them. And as the Chorus Trilogy continues, Carolina and Wash settle into what seems to be an increasingly comfortable partnership. It is undemonstrative, and they don’t talk about their history, but there seems to be an increasing rapport and trust. This culminates in “Great Destroyers,” the battle at the Purge Temple in which we see the true strength of their partnership, holding their own against the mercenaries. No, there still aren’t any emotional conversations. But it was enough to show us how far they had come since season 10. It meant something.

In season 15, Joe decided to show us an even greater level of closeness between Wash and Carolina. “Previously On” shows us both Freelancers as fully integrated into the Reds and Blues’ family, and “Battlescars,” contextually weird though it is, at least shows them finally talking about their shared history.

Season 16 decides to burn it all down.

In an arc where multiple characters are treated badly and these conflicts resolved with no apologies and no remorse,  _this_  is the one that feels… kind of like we can’t go back again. What Carolina withholds from Wash hurts him deeply. There’s no getting around that. It’s not just about characters having conflict. It’s not even just how contrived this conflict feels, putting a decision in Carolina’s hands that should never have been hers in the first place. More than any other character conflicts in this arc, what happens between Carolina and Wash in this season is a betrayal of trust. And I just don’t have any faith at this point that this conflict is going to resolve in a satisfactory way, without driving a permanent wedge between the characters.

And like Wash the Crash Dummy, it only serves to drive Carolina and the rest of the core cast to even greater mistakes… mistakes that are already obvious to us, and based on information clearly laid out in canon, should also be obvious to the characters.


	15. The Ending Was a Foregone Conclusion

Similar to last season, the stakes are only revealed to the characters about two episodes from the end. Ultimately, though, these stakes are the highest they’ve ever been in Red vs. Blue. Our heroes are about to make the biggest mistake of their lives: they’re about to tear apart the fabric of spacetime.

But here’s the thing: we knew that was going to happen.

You told us in the  _title._

And by the time we get to episode 15… titled “Paradox”... there is no question about how this season is going to conclude.

I don’t know where else to put this so I want to mention here that the lead-up to the finale at the end of the penultimate episode is  _fantastic._  Destiny and her sisters are one of the most inspired elements in the Nicolosi arc to me; their designs, with the faceless non-visors both suggestive and not-suggestive of eyes, are eerily perfect. Their voices are haunting. Each time I rewatch this episode I pause and back up at the end, just to watch them again, and I laugh at Genkins’ “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!” every time.

But the finale itself… well, there is a lot about it that I like, and yet overall I do not enjoy it. The drama is there. There is good music and some great shots, and…

At the same time, the whole Donut and O’Malley fight falls really flat to me. I was bored for most of it the first time through, to the point that it wasn’t until I was watching it more closely for transcription that I really absorbed all the gags. Even then, it just didn’t feel like it mattered.

The episode’s conclusion—in fact, the whole season’s conclusion—is in the title. The Reds and Blues were going to create a temporal paradox no matter what Donut or O’Malley did and at no point did I feel any tension about that plot point—at no point did I ever question that that was going to happen. We had been told, very explicitly, that this is what would happen, and then it happened and there was absolutely no surprise in that.

But what’s worse in my mind is that the characters were told just as explicitly as we were, by the author insert himself, that this would happen. It doesn’t matter how surgically precise they are. They are going back in time specifically for the purpose of preventing Wash’s injury. If Wash never gets shot, they will never have a reason to make that specific jump. They will therefore prevent themselves from time traveling. That’s a paradox. It’s right there. They heard it. We all heard it.

This season’s climax depends on every single character holding the idiot ball... because ultimately, while the stakes may be high, Chrovos can't  _make_  them do anything. They have to fuck it up themselves, because Angst Made Them Do It, and that is by far my biggest problem with this climax.


	16. The Stakes, Revisited

There are lot of ways escalation on a cosmic level can feel a little cheap, a little bit perfunctory. The Death Star becomes Starkiller. Thanos wants to kill half of everyone because of reasons. There are good reasons to escalate, and there are more and less successful ways to do so. It’s how stories, and characters, grow. But there is a danger to escalating too far and too fast at once. I cannot at this point judge whether the Nicolosi arc has done that. But I can say that it’s hard to imagine where we could go after season 17 concludes, just in terms of plot.

There’s no question that season 16 needed higher stakes than 15 had. I had trouble caring about the climax of 15, even with the stakes being everyone on Earth, because I didn’t  _know_  any of these people. In this season the stakes are reality itself, sure—but they’re also the fate of a character many fans care very much about, and his relationships with others characters.  _That’s_  where the stakes feel high to me. I wouldn’t feel sick over Carolina and Wash being driven apart if I didn’t  _care._  Those are stakes. I can appreciate that Joe’s made an effort to give us a story with stakes we care about.

My concern is whether he can resolve  _those_  stakes in season 17 with meaningful character growth—or whether, like Grif, like Donut, we will simply reset to the status quo. Get out the hate glue.

Joe has given us higher stakes, but he is not using those stakes to drive character growth and relationship development. Joe wants to tell us a story about how actions have consequences, and how things matter, but the choice of what matters—what actions stick, what decisions ramify, how characters allow their experiences to change them—if not handled thoughtfully, unravel the fabric of that very theme.

I can understand why so many fans love the wacky but still epic adventure of this arc. Love the adventure, the drama, the distinctive new cast of characters, the creative new settings. Love all of it. I don’t want to take that away from you.

I only ask you to try and understand why some fans who loved the found family dynamic that grew over the course of 13 seasons feel left out in the cold by this story, why it’s upsetting to see that character growth and those relationships torn down before our eyes.


	17. Conclusions

I do not think that Joe Nicolosi is a bad writer.

I think he’s exhaustingly insecure, and I think his constant need to assure us that He’s Seen Movies via references in his own work is a symptom of that. But I do not think he is without talent. His writing has a distinctive style, and he writes mostly good dialogue with a strong sense of comedic timing. He’s good at anticipating what the audience will figure out and pacing interesting reveals throughout the season to introduce new questions and maintain interest. He writes distinctive original characters. (Yes, I know a lot of people don’t like Jax, but Jax is one of over a dozen new characters introduced in these seasons, and if pressed I imagine you could probably find at least one you like.)

I think that given a platform to write an original comedy, and with a good editor to put the brakes on when necessary (something that every writer can benefit from), Joe could create a fun, entertaining, and charmingly weird romp. If Rooster Teeth were to give him his own show, I’d probably watch it.

But I do not care for his writing in Red vs. Blue. I do not think he fully grasps these characters as having continuous arcs since Blood Gulch. He seems to see them as collections of traits that may be harnessed for comedy or for drama, but which are ultimately malleable at the whims of the plot, and can just reset rather than grow and change. Carolina must be forever seeking absolution for her neverending mistakes. Wash exists to be acted upon by the plot rather than to act as a character with agency. Tucker will be forever succumbing to his worst impulses and then feeling bad about it after. Grif, Donut, and Doc will never  _really_  be respected by their friends, but it’s fine, at the end they’ll all come home and there will be pizza.

And you know, after sixteen seasons, I just want more for these characters than that.


End file.
